Storage-location networks (SANs) established their function as the heart of enterprise-level major storage in the early 2000s. A SAN is a collection of networked storage devices as my pal had mentioned, but a SAN is fully various from Network Attached Storage (NAS) which is also a form of networked storage. Using a SAN provides companies the capability to consolidate access to information storage plus the capacity to connect servers to that storage from anywhere on the network. This becomes clearer by contrasting SANs with a different networked storage technologies: NAS.
All the servers connect to the storage device over a high-speed network that makes use of the Fibre Channel protocol, which enables access to disks over a network. Improved resource utilization via an accessible, centralized information storage network that provides you the capability to manage it as a single entity. A network topology simply refers to the schematic description of how connecting lines and nodes are arranged in a network. Servers and storage have been normally sold as separate IT infrastructure elements in the previous, ordinarily to unique groups inside the IT division, and ordinarily below different components of the IT budget. Conventional storage only vendors have seen the light and are now joining forces with the major network vendors to generate the modular creating blocks (what I contact PODs) which consist of the storage as a component of the developing block. I keep in mind questioning what the large deal was due to the fact networked storage had been about for years.
With a NAS or SAN architecture, exactly where storage is shared across the requirements of multiple computers, 1 typically provisions a pool of shared spare storage that will serve the peak requires of the connected computers, which commonly is significantly less than the total amount of spare storage that would be necessary if individual storage devices were devoted to every single personal computer.
It controls the whole network and supplies a centralized storage location for information and computer software. In the case of a SAN however, it is doable to get Windows to treat a SAN volume as local storage (as opposed to a network drive), even if the physical storage device is located remotely. In a SAN, all the disk drives are stored in a dedicated storage device — a disk array. It does not need particular cabling and equipments like the case of a fiber channel network.
The SNIA (Storage Network Market Alliance) is an international, not-for-profit organization produced up of 55 voting member firms, who collaborate in an work to bring reputable storage options to the broader marketplace. For starters, customers can not frequently connect directly to SAN storage since user workstations communicate with other computer systems on the network using TCP/IP. In a DAS architecture the spare storage on 1 pc can not be utilized by a further.
